With fellow NaNoWriMo’er Jessica White’s reminder that today starts word validation on the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) site (and a calendar flashing November 20), I’m forced to admit this year probably won’t be a NaNo win for me. My current 16,457 is a long way from the 50K I need by November 30th. My daily writing spreadsheet (yes, I have one – don’t judge!) and NaNo show I’d need to write 3,050 words per day for the win. That’s not likely to happen.

And that’s okay.

I realized last week that my approach to NaNo has changed significantly since my first effort (and win!) in 2005. With that attempt, I did the word wars and sprints, the write-anything-to-fill-the-page plan (short of lorem ipsum) because I needed to convince myself I could write a full-length manuscript. I did much the same thing in 2006 for my second NaNo win. That effort – after many revisions and rewrites and rejections – became my debut novel FORTY & OUT.

In 2011, I was a bit more focused. I became a NaNo rebel that year, adding pages to a WIP, but still eking out the win with over 50K new words produced during the month.

I’m a rebel again this year, finishing the WIP that will be the follow-up to FORTY & OUT. But now that I have three completed novels, I find it’s much harder for me to write just anything to make word count – bad for NaNo totals, good for my story overall as the revision time will be much less.

Even better? I’m back in the routine of writing nearly every day, and feeling uncomfortable if I don’t. In the crush of my book release and promotions, and life in general, I let that slip away.